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ETHICS AND .ESTHETICS
OB,
ART AND ITS INFLUENCE ON OUR
SOCIAL PROGRESS.
‘Stctnre
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
ON
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, 5th MARCH, 1876.
BY
Dfi. G. G. ZERFFI, F.R.S.L., F.R. Hist. S.
One of the Lecturers in IUI. Department of Science and Art.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY THE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY.
1876.
Price Threepence.
�SYLLABUS.
1. The component elements of man’s nature.
2. Reason and imagination.
3. Ethics and ^Esthetics.
4. The Cosmical Laws in Nature and Art.
5. Distinction between “ Sublime ” and “ Beau
tiful.”
6. The most important conditions of Art.
7. Art as it shows itself in the three groups of
mankind.
8. Religion has been always one of the prin
cipal agents in exciting our innate dynamic force
to produce works of Art. The relative changes
in Religions reflect corresponding changes in Art.
9. Oriental and Greek Art. Architecture and
Sculpture.
10. Christian Art, and its distinguishing fea
tures from Ancient Art. Carving and Painting.
11. Gothicism, a revival of Indo-Buddhism and
Renaissance, a revival of Grseco-Romanism. Ideal
ism and Realism.
12. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the English, Ger
mans, Italians, and French on Art. Our social
progress as reflected in Art. Hogarth and Flax
man, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough.
Neglect of ^Esthetics. Symmetrophobia. China
mania. Rinkomania. Conclusion.
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ;
OB,
ART AND ITS INFLUENCE ON OUR SOCIAL PROGRESS.
HERE can be no doubt that there are con
flicting and often contradictory constituent
elements in man. He is God’s fairest creature, but
often capable of the meanest and most cruel actions,
of which no animal is guilty. This is, and will always
be the case, whenever these conflicting elements
are not properly developed and trained. Man, at
times, is more stupid than an animal; the assertion
that he learnt his first steps in art from plants and
animals, beginning with the lowest animals, is not
a mere hypothetical assertion, but a fact. Man, in
his first periods of development, often acts on mere
unconscious impulses.
He recognises outward
objects, sees them only as detached incoherent units,
and cannot yet observe them as the emanations of
one general idea, according to which they are
formed. At a later period, however, he becomes
conscious of his power to recognise detached objects
in their coherence, and traces in them general
features which unite them into grand harmonious
groups. The more he extends this latter power,
the more he becomes master of the surrounding
phenomena of the outer world, and the more his
artistic powers develope. The force to create is
as inborn in man as the force to think. The former
power is based on imagination affecting his emo
tional element, the latter on reason affecting his
intellectual capacity. Our reason must be guided
and cultivated as carefully as the art of walking.
A child left to itself would scarcely ever learn how
T
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ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
to walk upright—it must be taught to do so. Our
imagination requires the same training as our
reason. Necessity is the mother of invention, and
all that is unnecessary is looked upon as superfluous
and useless. But necessity is not the only mother
that leads us on to activity. As soon as we have
satisfied our wants, they cease to excite us to
further action, and we step into a second stage of
our intellectual faculty; we strive to embellish, to
beautify the means by which we have succeeded in
satisfying our wants. A knife with an ornamented
or carved handle does not cut better than one with
a plain handle; neither does a heavy club kill a
brother more quickly because its handle is ingeni
ously decorated with geometrical patterns ; a plain
pint jar does not hold more water because it is
glazed or painted with flowers and groups of dancing
nymphs, and still even savages decorate, ornament,
and embellish their every-day utensils, their huts,
and their very bodies. The faculty, the striving to
improve upon nature, is as much part of our entity
as breathing, eating, drinking, and money-making.
The power of enjoying and becoming conscious of
the cause of our enjoyment ought to be as much
cultivated as our endeavours to know. To cultivate
our reasoning faculty one-sidedly, and to pretend that
the world is a mere machine, is one of the most objec
tionable fundamental errors, one which would turn
humanity into a grand fraternity of “ Bounderbys ”
continually echoing the question into your ears,
What is the good of flowers on a carpet, or of
mouldings on a house, if only the sewage be good,
the ventilation perfect, and the wet kept out ? So
long as a nation is in a transition state from bar
barism into civilization, these “ Bounderbys ” reign
supreme ; but the moment that higher ethics take
the place of low conceptions concerning God and
the world, the inborn force of aesthetics begins to
ferment, to work in man, and to drive him to resign
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ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
his Hebrew-Puritan coarseness, and to begin to orna
ment, to improve the outer aspect of his houses and
towns, his every-day utensils, and to foster with
great energy the culture of the Fine Arts. As little
as birds can rise and sing in the heavens whilst the
storm is raging, but will wait until it is abated, so
it is with artists; their hearts and imagination are
dumb whilst utilitarian indifference oppresses the
social atmosphere, or political passionsrageinanation.
If the Fine Arts could be imported, as tallow is from
Russia, indigo from India, or turnips from Sweden, we
might do a tolerably good trade ; but the Fine Arts
do not grow like mushrooms in musty and moist,
in dark and hidden places, but only in the broad
daylight of general culture. It is not in vain that
we speak in the artistic world so much of our
“ stars.” Stars shine only when there is night;
the darker the night the brighter are the stars,
which often lose their lustre in the light of a tole
rably bright full-moon of criticism. We can see,
however, the bright dawn of a greater love of art
tinting our horizon; but we must learn, above all,
to look upon aesthetics as an important branch of
our education. We are living in the amiable con
ceit that a knowledge of the “ Beautiful” is a mere
matter of opinion. We wrap ourselves in the say
ing “de gustibus non est disputandum.” But we
dispute about the eastern postures, the real presence,
the right of believing in a personal devil, the es
sence of the Divinity, and the efficacy of embroid
ered petticoats for dancing priests, who patronise a
kind of art which has long gone out of fashion, and
will as little come into general use as “ tattooing ”
or pretty silk tailcoats in union with iron armour,
spears, cross-bows, and helmets.
If there be no absolute law in aesthetics, there is
none in ethics. For ethics, in fact, regulate relative
beauty in actions, whilst aesthetics regulate relative
taste in forms. Ethics teach us how to act rightly ;
B
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ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
eesthetics, how to see and appreciate beauty. The
one discerns between good and evil; the other be
tween beautiful and ugly. The one is philosophy
of action ; the other philosophy of form. The one
may be stated to be the logic of virtue; the other
the logic of taste. But between virtue and taste
there is merely a formal difference : the one affect
ing, as I have said, reason ; the other imagination
both constituent faculties of our mind. Ethics
teach us the idealisation of our nature, elevatingus into true human beings ; and aesthetics teach us.
the idealization of nature, transfiguring her worksinto works of art. The difference between the twolies in the fact that the moral teacher influencesever-changing agents and agencies, whilst the
aesthetical teacher influences the highest god-like
nature of man, through which works, that may de
light humanity for thousands of years, can be cre
ated in stone, on paper, or on canvas. Morality
is an utterly abstract and at the same time re
lative notion, like “ beauty:” but both may be
defined as based on the laws of the “ Cosmosand.
the Greeks used the same word for “ beautiful” asfor the “ universe.” The laws of nature form the
basis of all our right actions, and only so far as our
actions are in accordance with these eternal laws
can we say that we are really moral. It is a factthat the more nations deviated from these laws, the
more they built themselves “codes,” based on a
heated imagination ; the more monstrosities they
created in arts, the more sanguinary cruelties they
perpetrated in history. For morals and arts have
one and the same basis—namely, conformity to the
laws of nature. Morals consist in our becoming
masters of our own nature, and make us fit to live
as human beings in a social condition. This is ex
actly what eesthetics teach us with reference to the
forms of nature. We have to learn how to use the
laws of nature in creating anything so as to make
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
7
it a real work of art. The question whether our
reason or our sentiment was to be most affected by
a work of art led to two different schools, which
still leave it unsettled. Sentiment was to be placed
above sensation, or imagination above emotion ; as
though we could have sensations and emotions with
out our sentiments being aroused by our imagina
tion through outward impressions. The question
cannot rest on effects, but first on causes, producing
certain effects. The cause of all our striving after
emotions is found in the intellectual force with
which we are endowed, and which, driven into
false grooves through an imagination wrongly acted
upon, may seek for emotions which are either false,
ugly, pernicious, or monstrous. Nature everywhere
shows forces forming endless forms in space and
time. Here she differs from art, which has to bring
in space and time the creations of an unlimited
imagination into limited shapes and forms. Tnfinity
is the attribute of nature; finiteness the element of
art. Still, whilst nature in her infinity works
only to transform, or apparently to destroy, art
produces in her finiteness works which, stamped
with the power of intellect, outlast the works
of nature, and can be said to be immortal. How
many beautiful men and women passed away
whilst the marble-wrought gods of Phidias still live
amongst us. Where are TEschylos, Sophokles, Euri
pides, Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe ? The crea
tures of their imagination still live amongst us.
We hear the unrestrained curses of “ Prometheus
Bound ” resounding in our hearts ; we mourn with
Antigone ■ we are horrified with Medea; Brutus,
Antony, have vanished, but their memories, their
very speeches, have been recorded for ever by the
immortal Shakespeare ; Mary Stuart has been
clothed in an eternal, never-fading beauty by
Schiller; and Faust and the Devil have become
incarnations of a higher type through Goethe’s
master-mind.
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
Gazing at the heavens on a starry night, we see, in
addition to myriads of sparkling worlds floating in
the air, a great quantity of nebulse. Either decayed
systems of worlds, or worlds in formation. Worlds
which have lost their centre of gravity and fallen
to pieces ; or worlds which are seeking, according to
the general law of gravitation, to form a central
body by the attraction of cosmical ether. The one
phenomenon is that of destruction, the other that of
formation. This double cosmical process is continu
ally repeating itself in the development of art. Art
is like a mirror—whatever looks into it is reflected
by it. If a poor untrained imagination stares into
the mirror, no one must be astonished that poor and
distorted images result. Nature furnishes us with
mortar and stones for the building, but the archi
tect’s intellectual force has to arrange the elements
and to bring them into an artistic shape. Nature
furnishes us with flowers, trees, animals, and men ;
but the artist has to reproduce and to group them so
as to impress the objective forms of nature with his
own intellectual subjectivity. To become thoroughly
conscious of the distinction between the “ sublime ”
and “ beautiful ” is the first step towards a correct
understanding of works of art.
During the long period of the geological formation
of the earth, when mountains were towered upon
mountains, rocks upheaved, islands subsided ; when
air, water, fire, and solid matter seemed engaged in
never-ending conflict—nature was sublime. The
dynamic force appeared to be the only working
element in nature, and the counterbalancing static
force seemed to be without influence. Gradually,
vegetable and animal life in their first crude forms
commenced to show themselves. Zoophytes deve
loped into megatheriums and mastadons. Mam
moths and elks sported on plains which now form
the mountain-tops of our continents.
Scarcely
visible coral insects were still engaged in construct-
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
9
ing mountain chains, and a luxuriant vegetation
covered the small continents which were surrounded
by apparently endless seas. Such changes, trans
formations, and convulsions are gigantic, grand,
awe-inspiring—sublime—but not beautiful. When
ever nature is at work disturbing the air with elec
tric currents or shaking huge mountains so that they
bow their lofty summits, or when the dry soil is rent
asunder, and sends forth streams of glowing lava,
we are in the presence of the sublime—but not of
the beautiful. Whenever man’s nature is overawed,
whenever he is made to feel his impotence by the
phenomena of nature, he faces the sublime. When,
however, the cosmical forces had expended their
exuberant powers, when a diversified climate had
produced those plants and animals that surround
us, when man appeared in his threefold develop
ment, as black, yellow, and white man on this re
volving planet, and by degrees reached his highest
development, then only art acquired, through man’s
consciousness of what is beautiful, a real meaning
and existence on earth. Science eternally tries to
vanquish error. Industry subdues matter, and uses
it for utilitarian purposes : but the vocation of art
is to produce beauty for beauty’s sake, and to idealise
nature.
Nature produces like art. It is characteristic that
some people continually talk of the Divinity as a
“ maker,” which at once shows the low conception
they have of the incomprehensible first cause. We
may talk of a “ watchmaker ” or a “ shoemaker,”
but to speak of a “ world-maker ” degrades the
divinity which endows matter with inherent laws,
and then, according to the immutable law of causation, allows it unconsciously to assume its varie
gated forms. The products of art, on the other
hand, are the results of the conscious intellectual
power of the artist. It is the free yet well-regu
lated consciousness of the artist that elevates his
�IO
ETHICS AND ^ESTHETICS.
productions into works of art. Undoubtedly the
great store-house of the artist is nature ; he learns
from her how to create, but he has to discern, to
combine, to adapt, to select his forms, and to know
the laws of combination, adaptation, and, above all,
selection; for the whole success of an artist, in what
ever branch he works, depends on his power of
selection and rejection. This power of selection
varies in the three groups of mankind.
The negro is triangular-headed (prognathos), with
his facial lines drawn downwards; lie is the fossil,
or the antediluvian man, and as such indulges in an
antediluvian taste ; his mechanical skill is that of
a child; he never goes beyond geometrical figures
and glaringly bright colours. The negro is still the
woolly-headed, animal-faced being represented on
the tombs of the Pharaohs, because his bodily struc
ture and facial lines have not altered during thou
sands of years. In studying his artistic products,
his customs and manners, we are struck with their
resemblance to those which our more direct fore
fathers, the Turanians and Aryans, used when still
in a savage state. They used, and still use, the
same kind of flint instruments ; their pottery is the
same; their clubs, paddles, the cross-beams of their
huts, are adorned with the same rope and serpent
like windings and twistings.
Next we have the Turanian (from “ tura,” swift
ness of a horse); he is square and short-headed,
(brachikephalos), the traditionary yellow man. His
face is flat, his nose deeply sunken between his
prominent cheeks, and his reasoning faculty only
developed to a certain degree. He has small, oblique
eyes, the lines of his face being turned upwards,
expressing cunning and jocularity. He is an excel
lent rider, but a slow, though steady walker. He
looks on nature with a nomadic shepherd’s eye, and
not with that of a settled artist. He possesses
remarkable technical ability, has great powers of
�ETHICS AND ^ESTHETICS.
11
imitation, can produce geometrical ornamentations
of the most complicated and ingenious character,
and excels in a realistic reproduction of flowers,
fishes, butterflies, and birds; he has no sense for
perspective, and no talent for modelling by means
of shade and light. He is incapable of drawing a
dog, a horse, or a human being.
Finally, we have the Aryan, the long or oval
headed man (dolichokephalos), the historical white
man, the crowning product of the cosmical forces
of nature so far as our globe is concerned. His
facial lines are composed of the emblems of the two
conflicting forces working throughout nature, the
static, represented by a horizontal, and the dynamic
by a vertical line, both framed in by an oval. To
him alone we owe art in its progressive develop
ment and its highest sense. He surpasses the two
other groups of humanity not only in technical
skill, but especially in his inventive and reasoning
power, critical discernment, and purity of artistic
taste. The white man was unquestionably the
founder of all the different religious systems. He
tried with his inborn faculty of intellect to answer
the three questions : Where from ? what for ? and
where to ? He measured synthetically the three
dimensions of space and time ; he tried to trace the
three ever-stable and still ever-varying phenomena
of creation, preservation, and transformation. Art
was the most important means to give utterance in
forms to these answers ; and thus the art-forms of
the Orientals, as well as of the Greeks, are but con
tinuous commentaries on their religious conceptions.
It is this fact that necessitates a correct knowledge
of the phases, developments, and changes in the
different religions, as the abstract products of our
endeavours to solve the mysterious questions forced
upon us by nature, and their concrete results in
visible forms by means of works of art. The In
dians, in striving to give shape and form to abstract
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ETHICS AND ESTHETICS.
notions, lost themselves through an ill-trained, over
whelming imagination, and produced caricatures.
The Persians, in worshipping the Deity in pure
thoughts, engendering pure words and producing
pure deeds, built magnificent palaces, but scarcely
any temples. We have no representations of their
Divinities ; neither of Ormuzd nor of Ahriman, but
we have Fervers and Devas, the former as winged
human beings, the latter as winged animals or com
positions of animals, chimeras, or as symbols of the
King’s power. The theological, religious, and sym
bolical elements are altogether neglected in the
Perso-Assyrian and Babylonian reliefs. We have
the friends, relations, attendants, and servants, of
the King; tributaries submitting to Kings ; officers
holding fly-flaps of feathers; horses crossing rivers ;
kings hunting and slaying lions ; armies before be
sieged towns; warriors returning from battle; in
fantry and horse with spears, bows and arrows;
boats floating on rivers; galleys going to sea;
damsels and children with musical instruments;
and mathematical tablets with calculations of square
roots. We might study all this and verify what I say
at this moment, if our magnificent British Museum
were not a book, provided with the seven seals of
Sabbatarian bigotry, closed to the nation as a means
of higher education on the Sunday. We should see
in these Assyrian works of art the very opposite of
Egyptian art; the one the outgrowth of man’s capa
city as a human being, and the other the result of agloomy, mighty hierarchy looking on man as created
for another world—neglecting houses, but construct
ing monumental temples in honour of the gods. In
every form Egyptian art reflects the stifling influ
ences of a hierarchy. But the East never succeeded,
whether in Asia or Africa, in freeing itself from the
influence of the marvellous. Now the marvellous
can only form a certain constituent part in man’s
artistic products; so far as it reflects the sublime
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
13
impressions of natural phenomena. These impres
sions, working through our senses on our intellect,
must come under the regulating and checking in
fluences of reason, engendering symmetry, eurythmy,
proportion, action, and expression. The Indians
tried to explain the phenomena of nature in an ab
stract sense, and to bring metaphysics into outward
shapes ; the Persians were bent on the glorification
of power, visible on earth in the person of the despot,
and their sculptures are but monotonous rows of
stiff attendants as far as the men are concerned.
The animals are treated with greater freedom, be
cause the artist was not tied down by court rules or
ceremonials, as in the treatment of the King and
his myrmidons. The Egyptians tried to copy the
material phenomena of nature, brought them into geo
metrical forms, and marked them with realistically
drawn symbols. When a deity as some force of nature
was invested with a form, the form being one with
some religious dogma or mystic emblem of the power
of the gods, such form could not be changed; for it
became in art what technical words are in science.
When once a form with its symbols and emblems
was settled, as that of Brahma, Vishnu, S’iva, Osiris,
or Isis, or the serpent fixed as the symbol of
eternity, the hawk as that of light, the inner spi
ritual life of the artist was tied down to outward
forms with special inward meanings, and the con
straining sway of misunderstood nature on one side,
and the stationary precepts of an omnipotent hier
archy on the other, entangled the artist’s imagina
tion and paralysed every effort of his individual
subjectivity. The different artistic forms of the
Eastern nations became by degrees petrified and
immutable national and religious incrustations.
Even when geometrical figures, flowers or leaves,
and animals were used, the combinations were
marred by a want of harmony between the dynamic
and static elements in their composition. There is
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ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
always a “too much,” rarely a “too little.” The
East rent nature asunder, looked upon matter as
evil, and yet matter was to be used to bring the
eternal spirit into form. The element of S’iva,
Ahriman, or Typhon was to give expression to the
essence of Brahma, Ormuzd, or Osiris. What
wonder, then, that the artists succeeded so badly,
and that their gods looked in abstracto as. well as
in concreto so much like infernal monstrosities., So
long as the Greeks were in these Asiatic fetters
they produced similar forms, as also did Christian
art in its infancy, as may be seen in the South
Kensington Museum in the splendid cast of the
Buddhistic gate of the Sanchi Tope, which is close
to a cast by Veit Stoss, a Nuremberg sculptor of the
fifteenth century. But as soon as the self-conscious
spirit of youthful humanity was aroused in the
Greeks through their poets and philosophers, art
improved in the same ratio as the hierarchical
power and the superstitious belief in their gods
diminished. Feelings and emotions were as much
fostered with the Greeks as the consciousness of
these phenomena. Prometheus may be said to
have been the best and most intelligible emblem of
classic heathen humanity, as Faust may be con
sidered the representative of romantic Christian
humanity. Prometheus longed to bring matter
into form; Faust to know what kept matter and
spirit together, and what became of the spirit if
once freed from matter. Prometheus made man of
clay, stole fire from heaven, and vivified the image
with his stolen fire. Faust knew that the heavenly
fire was a force over which he had no control, and
he called upon a spirit of the lower burning regions
to teach him — “how all one whole harmonious
weaves, each in the other works and lives. The
formal outer-form is the longing of the Greek
Faust, and the spiritual inner-life the aspiration of
the Teuton Prometheus. Architecture and sculp-
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
I5
ture were the distinguishing characters of Greek
art; carving and painting were the elements of
Christian art, especially in its first slow develop
ment, struggling to free itself in architecture as
well as in sciences from the oppressive influences of
an Indo-Egyptian hierarchy. To the immortal
honoui- of that hierarchy it must be recorded that
they helped humanity in the development of art
with all their power. I will not enter into a pain
ful inquiry as to how far they endeavoured, like
the Egyptian priests or the Buddhistic Bonzes, to
divert mankind from thinking and reasoning through
the erection of mighty churches. These edifices
were constructed in the old Egyptian sense so far
as the subterranean vaults were concerned. The
superstructures were simply revivals of IndoBuddhistic rock-hewn temples, placed as detached,
free -standing monuments in the midst of crooked
small streets, with crooked little houses in which
very crooked-thinking beings must have lived, shut
ting out the glorious daylight by means of painted
glass or numberless leaden hexagons—probably so
many symbols of the fetters which humanity had
to shake off through a revival of Grseco-Romanism
in art and in our modes of thinking, building, and
painting. How intimately our intellectual and sci
entific progress is interwoven with our progress in
morals and political freedom may nowhere be
studied to greater advantage than in the artistic
life of the Greeks under Perikles, and the artistic
movement of Italy during the sixteenth century,
when the invention of the art of printing, the dis
covery of America, the study of the ancient classics
and the Reformation brought new life, new ideas
amongst the masses ; and we must all be convinced
that art requires a certain moral and intellectual
condition under which alone it will live. If the
intellectual or moral atmosphere be changed, the
artists either work in an Egyptian or Indo-Assyrian
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ETHICS AND ^ESTHETICS.
style. If a continual abhorrence of the body as theseat of thousands of devils be preached, we shall be
furnished by our artists with those emaciated, elon
gated, spider-armed and legged saints that adorned
the churches with their meagre half-starved frames
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We
shall have pictures representing men and women
roasted, boiled, quartered, pinched with iron tongs,
or broken on the wheel, or starved in dungeons.
The influence of such an art must have been
terrible on the ethical or moral education of man
kind. For what pity could man have for his fel
low-creatures when his eyes rested on the frightful
scenes of the torments which St. Catherine under
went when broken on the wheel; St. Primatius,
who was burnt alive ; St. Peter, who was crucified
with his head downwards; or St. Lambert, who was
beaten with a club, and so on ? Could men be ex
pected to have treated their wretched fellow sinners
with great kindness, when they could point to a
crucified God, and to his best followers tormented to
death ? How much art was the mere reflection of
this diabolical spirit of the darkest ages, and how
much art again contributed to the demoralised hard
ening of the masses, it would be difficult to decide.
It is a further fact that, with the revival of classic
feelings in poetry and sciences, art turned with
horror from these ugly scenes, and painted the
Virgin with the child, bringing men through a more
humane representation of the divinity into nearer
relations with our higher aspirations. But if the
surroundings of the artists be changed again through
the superstitions of an ignorant mob, the despotic
organisation of a government, or the rule of a wild
and bigoted party, the artistic force will also change
or die out altogether. The artist acts only to a cer
tain extent on the public, whilst the public re-acts
with a combined and often entirely crushing “ vis
inertias ” on the artist. I have only here to mention
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
17
the evils which Puritanism, with its Hebrew hatred of
art and refinement, produced in this once“ merry Old
England.” Artists can often only reflect the intel
lectual atmosphere in which they live. How is a
man who sees nothing but emaciated, beggarly, or
sanctimonious faces, thin limbs, hungry looks, dwel
lings bare of all domestic comfort, decayed brick
houses and crumbling walls, to paint convivial
scenes of happiness and joy ? Or let me draw
another picture; how is a man to paint mighty
dramatic scenes on a canvas, when he has to live in
an atmosphere of so-called modern respectability,
seeing always the same bland smiles around him,
the same trimmed whiskers, the same stiff collars,
with the same faultless but not less stiff bows, hear
ing the same stereotyped insignificant phrases about
the weather, the funds, the high prices of coals or
butcher’s meat, receiving an order for a so-called
nice little picture, with plenty of sentiment in a
dead cock-robin, and the important question put
under it, “ Who killed cock-robin ?” in old Gothic
letters ; or another for a yawning Christ, who, tired
of his daily work, does not enjoy his god-head,
brightly looking towards the hour when he is with
his last breath on the Cross to redeem humanity.
Such a poetical conception, painted yawning, is
truly a sign of our times, but not one of the most
encouraging. We are just passing through a crisis.
We were too strongly Platonists in our notion of
art until recently. Plato used to place artists in
the same category with hair-dressers, cooks, and
eheats, who continually try to belie us. This is a
mean view for so divine a philosopher to take,
but nothing is too mean for a divine philoso
pher to assert when it suits his preconceived hypo
theses. Aristotle improved on Plato, and advocated
“ limitation,” “ order,” and “ symmetry.” Aristotle
already treats of “ reality” in art, which has to as
sume the concrete form of beauty, and wishes that
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
our “imitation. ” (jiipr)cris') of nature should be done
under the influence of purification (icaOapais), and he
admits the effect which art must have on the gene
ral improvement of morals as they work ethically,
pathetically, and practically. Plotinus, of the
Alexandrian school, is next to be studied. Self
motion is with him the essence of absolute beauty,
which self-motion is to be expressed in a work of art.
With him a beautiful work of art is not a mere re
production of reality, but he requires to see in it
the reflection of the “ moving (subjective) spirit” of
the artist j as soon as the moving idea is not to be
traced, he condemns the work as “ ugly.” Influ
enced by the spreading “ spiritualism ” of Christia
nity, he assumes “matter” as “evil,” as the nega
tive element of the “ ideal ” of “ good.” The vivi
fying and idealising element giving form to thoughts
is the essential element of beautv. He goes beyond
the principles of antiquity in sculpture and wishes
the art of painting to concentrate all its efforts on
the expression of an inner life through the eye. For
nearly 1500 years art is left without a theoretical
guide. After a life of beauty in the antique, we
have a revived second life. This resurrection took
place through the Renaissance, this true and mighty
offspring of the Reformation. “ Love,” in its most
sublime meaning, became the fundamental basis of
modern art. It was in this glorious island that
aesthetics received, like “ political economy,” a sys
tematic form for the first time. We have continued
to cultivate the study of political economy, with its
regulations of demand and supply; we have even
gone so far as richly to reward fat cocks and pigs,
cows and bulls, big-eared rabbits, goitered pigeons,
and have our horse, baby, and barmaid shows ; but
we have not continued the study of aesthetics, and
have shut out the very word from our modern phi
losophical writings. Hutcheson, however (16941747), revived the study of the beautiful, and Cousin
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
I9
is honest enough to accord to the Englishman the
priority in having placed sentiment above sensa
tion, and written on the laws of the beautiful.
Hutcheson distinguished the faculty which perceives
pure beauty from the two which were generally sup
posed to comprise the entire soul, namely, under
standing and physical sensibility. The idea that
art would decline when metaphysics, as some mate
rialists chose to call aesthetics, flourished, is not borne
out by facts in art-history ; neither is that perni
cious idea correct, “ that the arts of poetry, painting
and sculpture may exclusively flourish under a
despotic government.” Those who have studied art
history may point to the period of Perikles, under
whom art flourished, and attained the very highest
development in sculpture and architecture. Art
began to flourish during the Middle Ages in the freetowns of Germany and Italy, and not under the
despotic sway of the Imperial House of Hapsburg.
French art revived under the Republic and during
the Liberal Government of Louis Philippe; it flour
ished, and continues to flourish, under the sway of
the liberal-minded Hohenzollerns in Prussia; it was
neither under the despotic King John, nor under
Henry VIII., but under the great and immortal
Queen Elizabeth that Shakespeare wrote his master
works, his divine historical paintings in words.
Freedom of thought in poetry and art may exist
often under a despot, whilst even a Commonwealth,
if swayed by purely utilitarian ideas, will stifle and
kill art altogether. Quetelet is incorrect in saying
that “modern art has suffered from a too servile
imitation of the ancients.” Art has suffered
from a neglect of the study of the antique, and
from the false notion that a slavish imitation
of nature could be art. Whilst Germans and French
continued in the path which Hutcheson was the
first to point out, and introduced the study of
aesthetics into all their schools, whilst no great
�20
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
French or German philosopher could dare to separate
ethics and aesthetics, our great thinkers consider the
emotional beneath their dignity. They propound
that only what can be weighed, demonstrated, or
calculated deserves an earnest man’s attention. It
was that matter of fact, philosophical Bounderby,
Feed, who said that the “ Fine arts are nothing else
but the language of nature, which we brought into
the world with us, and have unlearned by disuse,
and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it.
Abolish the use of articulate sounds and writing
among mankind for a century and every man would
be a painter, an actor, and an orator.” It is per
fectly astounding at times to see what some of our
authorities venture to put on paper. Is there a
single fact in the whole history of humanity to bear
out this bold paradoxical assertion of a not entirely
dementicated writer. But the mischief was done.
In vain did Sir Joshua Reynolds try through theory
and practice to raise art from the contempt into
which it had fallen with us; in vain did many
masters like Gainsborough paint; in vain did Flax
man with his chisel endeavour to revive classic
sculpture, in surpassing many antique products and
emulating the very best works of antiquity; in
vain did Haydon sigh for higher aims in art, for
historical paintings, and sacrifice himself at last,
seeking despairingly death rather than a life under
the baneful influence of indifference. Hogarth, this
immortal Walter Scott in colours, Shaftesbury,
Henry Home, and Edmund Burke also contributed
some extraordinary theories on the study of aesthetics.
It was the pride of Hogarth to have discovered the
t( serpent-line,” or rather the waving line, as the
line of beauty; so that a wriggling worm is the
eternal prototype of beauty. The French early
advocated a coarse realism, whilst the Germans are
often too metaphysical and, to the detriment of
technical execution, lay too much stress on the idea
�ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
21
which the artist intends to carry out. We have in
later years made gigantic strides towards a correct
study and appreciation of taste in general. We
have done much towards an improvement in art.
We possess more means for cultivating art than any
other nation. No second British Museum, no
second South Kensington Museum exists in the
world. We need only employ the same energy
with which we collect old, quaint-looking China,
always with a keen eye to business, to attain great
artistic results. We admire plates dressed as ladies
in brocade and silk with flounces and lace, and
ladies or mandarins walking about like tea-pots or
flower-vases. Our symmetrophobia, which makes
us hate every straight line, and our Chinamania
are excellent signs, not less than our Rinkomania.
and Cookomania. We have at last awakened to
the emotional, if not yet in the right, at least in a
better direction. It is no more the lisping spiritual
adviser that interests us at a game of croquet. We
prefer an old plate with bright flowers to him, and
paper our walls with cups and saucers instead of
whitewashing them; we do not discuss any longer
the last dull sermon ; we slide on little wheels on
asphalte-ice, and prove to the world that with horse
racing, rowing, and rinking we intend to be the
ancient Greeks in modern Ulster coats ! All these
freaks of a misdirected taste will die out; and now
that the emotional is aroused, it will, when directed
into a proper groove, produce marvels. We had
once a Michael Angelo in words, what hinders us
from having a Shakespeare in colours. Nothing
but the indifference and tastelessness of the public.
Let us only treat aesthetics at the central seats ot
our learning, in our colleges, but essentially in our
ladies’ schools, with the same fervour as ethics, and
cur symmetrophobia, Chinamania and Rinkomania
will soon become matters of the past. There ought
not to be a town with a mayor in this wealthy
�22
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
kingdom that has not its public library, its museum,
and, above all, its picture-gallery filled with the
products of our talented, striving, home artists.
Wedgwood made his fortune, and raised English
'china to works of art, through English artists;
Minton did the same; and the Doulton manufactory
of terra-cotta, &c. has recently sent for the Inter
national Exhibition at Philadelphia works of art,
exclusively the work of English artists, that will do
honour to our progress in this long neglected branch.
We must try to support talent wherever we find it,
and not only pay fabulous sums to those who
happen to be fashionable, but to all those who strive
to improve their artistic powers, and could do so
still more if they received half the support an old
China tea-pot or a Japanese monstrosity is capable
of commanding, or is afforded to the establishment
of rinks, which display angular gymnastics to the
detriment of our sound limbs. Courses on aesthetics
proving their identity with sound ethics, arousing
and satisfying our emotional nature in a higher
direction, would be of inestimable advantage to our
political economy, our taste, and our fame as an
artistic nation.
In conclusion, I may draw your attention to the
three different points from which we may study
aesthetics. We may do this from a realistic, an his
torical, or a philosophical point of view.
Realism and idealism may be traced in a con
tinual conflict in the domains of aesthetics as in
the domains of ethics. The realistic school of art
has in later years had an immense influence with
us. In the same ratio, I may say, as the realistic
school in science. But whilst the realistic school in
science continually tries to prove some general pro
position, which is to be converted from a mere
hypothesis into a systematically proven theory, art
critics have gone so far as to demand from artists
the very stratification of rocks, or of the different
�ETHICS AND .ESTHETICS.
23
kinds of soil, to such an extent that the farmer
should be able to recognise the ground in which tosow his oats or wheat. Pictures, according to these
gesthetical wiseacres, should be geological maps or
mineralogical surveys; as far as flowers are con
cerned they ought to be perfect specimens fit for a
herbarium ; and as to the human body they should
present correct diagrams of veins and sinews and
strongly-protruding muscles. When these critics
take up the archaeological branch of art they advo
cate with indomitable tenacity the old forms and
check the imagination wherever they can. Art is
only to be a reflex of old Greek or Gothic forms, of
Chinese or Indian curiosities, or a slavish reproduc
tion of the Renaissance. The self-creative origi
nality of the artist is neither guided nor even taken
into consideration by this school.
The art-historians proceed in the right direction.
They endeavour to bring before our eyes the past,
so as to enable us to understand the present and to
influence the future of our art. But the historians
have driven us into two divergent backward direc
tions. They either advocate the antique, or they
are consistent Goths—sham Goths generally; the
one holding that everything beautiful must be a
fret, a meander, or a Korinthian pattern, or they
delight in symbolic trefoils, finials, pinnacles, but
tresses, thin and lofty spires, pointed arches, and
darkish-painted windows; neither seeing what an
anachronism is advocated. The philosophical school
at last often indulges in tall phrases—the more un
intelligible the better. We hear of the depth and
breadth of the picture, of deep sentiment and nice
feeling, of perspective in the clouds, &c. We are
startled with hypothetical paradoxes, with specu
lations of the wildest sort on grouping, expression,
and the flowing lines of the composition. As on
theological and medical matters, everyone thinks
himself justified to have an opinion of his or her
�■24
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS.
own on art matters ; as though ethics and aesthetics,
like medicine, were not the results of thousands of
years—now progressive, then again retrograde, but
always onward striving movements of humanity.
Music, poetry, and art have, as well as our morals,
laws which must be known and studied. Music
speaks in sounds, poetry in words, art in forms,
morals in actions. But without harmony, music
would became dissonance; without rhythm, poetry
■would be but an inflated prose ; art without aesthe
tics, a vulgar and objectionable caricature ; and our
morals without ethics, an arbitrary confusion of
whimsical actions. Ethics and aesthetics will fur
nish us with that bright and real worship of God
and his nature, reflected in our creative powers,
for which so many of us yearn with eager hearts;
they will bring to us that bright future in which
men, freed from all fetters of prejudice and super
stition, will unite reason, as the father of science,
with emotion, as the mother of art.
SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
To provide for the delivery on Sundays in the Metropolis, and
to encourage the delivery elsewhere, of Lectures on Science,
—physical, intellectual, and moral,—History, Literature,
and Art; especially in their bearing upon the improvement
and social well-being of mankind.
THE SOCIETY’S LECTURES
ARE DELIVERED AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
On SUNDAY Afternoons, at FOUR o'clock precisely.
(Annually—from November to May).
Members’ £1 subscription entitles them to an annual ticket
(transferable and admitting to the reserved seats), and to eight
single reserved-seat tickets available for any lecture.
For tickets and the published lectures apply (by letter, enclos
ing postage-stamps, order, or cheque), to the Hon. Treasurer, Wm.
Henry Domville, Esq., 15 Gloucester Crescent, Hyde Park, W.
PRINTED BY c. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Ethics and aesthetics; or, Art and its influence on our social progress. A lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St. George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 5th March, 1876
Creator
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Zerffi, G. G. (Gustavus George)
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 24 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Presented in Memory of Dr. Moncure D. Conway by his children, July Nineteen hundred & eight.
Publisher
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Sunday Lecture Society
Date
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1876
Identifier
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N703
CT10
Subject
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Ethics
Aesthetics
Philosophy
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Ethics and aesthetics; or, Art and its influence on our social progress. A lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St. George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 5th March, 1876), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Aesthetics
Art
Conway Tracts
Ethics
NSS